Eight days before Christmas 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Captain Daniel J. Callaghan, his naval aide, to suggest names for a number of authorized ships that included destroyer tenders. On 21 December the Bureau of Navigation provided the chief executive with candidates for his consideration, including one that honored the “valley and its environs in east-central California” that encompassed the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
A week later, the fifth ship of the Dixie class, two of which were already serving in the Fleet, became the Yosemite, designated AD-19. The Navy awarded the contract for her construction on 10 April 1941. Just under eight months later, the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet and naval, military, and air installations on Oahu drew the United States into World War II.
Workers at the Tampa Shipbuilding Company in Florida laid the Yosemite’s keel on 19 January 1942, 43 days after Pearl Harbor. On 16 May 1943, the new tender slid down the ways. Lola W. Powers—whose husband Melville, a retired commander with 30 years’ service who served as assistant general manager of the building yard—performed the christening. Construction continued, with the Yosemite being commissioned on 25 May 1944.
Her sheer size awed young Machinist’s Mate Second Class Dick Wibom: “I couldn’t believe how big she looked.” Captain George C. “Bull” Towner, who at the start of the war had been navigator of the heavy cruiser Louisville (CA-28) on her return voyage to Pearl Harbor from Manila, assumed command of the Yosemite. He told his crewmen on commissioning day that they had been given a fine ship “but [one] with no reputation and with no ship’s spirit.” Those intangibles lay within their power to earn and generate.
Following her shakedown cruise and fitting-out, which included enlarging the ventilating systems for the engine rooms and combat-information center, the Yosemite sailed for the Pacific, reaching Pearl Harbor on 29 August 1944. She welcomed her first customer, the Caldwell (DD-605), alongside on 2 September. Over the next five months, the tender provided repairs to 216 ships, of which 126 had been alongside.
The Yosemite then steamed to Eniwetok, then to Ulithi, in the western Caroline Islands, arriving on 3 March 1945 to begin the busiest month yet of her career—tending 73 ships (21 of which she took alongside) that generated 1,689 work requests. Her hardworking crew maintained its sanity among the business of readying ships for the Okinawa campaign with pinochle, clandestine craps games, and music—from ragtime to classical. One year after Bull Towner had talked of reputation and spirit, he declared on the Yosemite’s first anniversary: “The ‘Mighty Y’ [as she had become known] takes off her hat to no other tender afloat.”
Powered by geared turbines with 11,000 shaft-horsepower that turned twin screws, the Yosemite had made 19.6 knots on trials, making her and her sisters the fastest destroyer tenders of the U.S. Fleet. Her heaviest boom capacity was 20 tons, with the cranes so situated as to be able to service radar antennae. Her bunkers could contain 24,555 barrels of fuel oil and 2,705 of diesel fuel.
She sported a main battery equal to a destroyer’s—four dual-purpose 5-inch/38s, two stepped forward and two aft on the centerline. By the time the Yosemite entered the Fleet, even tenders bristled with antiaircraft weapons, wartime experience having proved the 40-mm Bofors and 20-mm Oerlikon machine guns far more capable of downing a fast, modern, high-performance plane than the 1.1-inch/75-caliber and .50-caliber machine guns that had been the secondary batteries of auxiliaries.
Several large hatches on both sides of the ship provided easy access to the spaces within her thin steel shell. On the upper deck, one found an operating room, a sick bay, and a dental office, as well as shops to fix canvas and gyros. In addition, there was a pattern shop and a carpenter shop, a sonar-attack teacher and a typewriter shop. On the main deck were shops to maintain fire-control and optical equipment and one for watch repair, as well as a photographic lab and a design and blueprint room.
A traveling crane serviced the Yosemite’s cavernous machine-shop well to the second deck below. In addition, the repair department spaces on the main deck featured a foundry and a blacksmith shop, as well as pipe, welding, boiler, and sheet-metal shops. The second deck housed an even larger machine shop and an electrical shop. The third deck contained the torpedo shop.
The Mighty Y—now referred to by her crew as “The Busy Lady”—accompanied the Pacific Fleet to Japan after hostilities ceased, providing services at Sasebo and Yokosuka. Returning then to the States, she became flagship for commander, Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet, at Portland, Maine, on 17 June 1946. Six months later she moved to Newport, Rhode Island; that remained her home port until October 1969, when she steamed to Mayport, Florida, to take up duties there. Her voyages took her from Oslo, Norway, to Portsmouth, England; Athens, Greece; and Naples, Italy.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Yosemite provided services for destroyers at Kingston, Jamaica. Many years after that dangerous confrontation, she also played a small part in establishing the groundwork for what President George H. W. Bush called “a better U.S.-Soviet relationship . . . an instrument of positive change for the world”—the end of the Cold War. On 3 December 1989, upon the conclusion of summit talks at Malta between Bush and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, the President thanked the captain and crew of the guided-missile cruiser Belknap (CG-26) for their “great support.”
The Belknap’s commanding officer in turn praised the Yosemite’s “superb support under often difficult short-fuse conditions” as the cruiser and her men had prepared for the presidential visit. The tender’s captain, Harlan R. Bankert Jr. (who had enlisted three months before the Cuban crisis began), noted that his ship’s carpenter shop, print shop, and sail loft had “played a helpful role in the successful completion of the presidential summit.” Certainly, the Belknap’s commanding officer contended, “we could not have accomplished what had to be done without Yosemite’s help. That you did it all with a positive, can-do approach is the hallmark of a great tender.”
Cancellation of the Yosemite’s July 1993 deployment saddened Lieutenant Michael A. Boslet, her chief engineer, who considered his tour in the venerable tender the biggest challenge of his career. “It would have been nice to deploy one last time,” Boslet lamented, “I think she has some miles left in her.”
The Yosemite was decommissioned on 27 January 1994 at Naval Station Mayport, and her “Don’t Tread on Me” jack—flown by the oldest ship in continuous commission—consequently was transferred to the repair ship Jason (AR-8). Stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on the same day, The Busy Lady met her end nearly a decade later, on 18 November 2003, as she served the Fleet for one final time—a target in a Fleet training exercise.
Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, who had flown his flag in the Yosemite as commander, Destroyers, Atlantic Fleet, shortly before he became Chief of Naval Operations, fondly remembered her as “not one of the grand dames of the fleet, but [one that could] repair wounds, care for their crews, and fix their ailments. Without her,” he maintained with a certainty that reflected his experience as a destroyerman, “[the ships of the Fleet] could not have done their duty. She was a true Battle Fleet tender!”